Repainting in P3D using Gimp

[hangarrat101]

Evening all, I'm looking at getting into repainting aircraft, particularly Ant's Tiger Moth, as there are quite a few repaints I'd like to try. I've downloaded both the paint kit and gimp, however in all honesty am at a loss as to where to start exactly. I've had a look at a couple of tutorials, but I'm finding all the layers in the paint kit quite confusing. Any ideas as to where I might be able to go to find out? Many Thanks!

[pilto von pilto]

Evening all, I'm looking at getting into repainting aircraft, particularly Ant's Tiger Moth, as there are quite a few repaints I'd like to try. I've downloaded both the paint kit and gimp, however in all honesty am at a loss as to where to start exactly. I've had a look at a couple of tutorials, but I'm finding all the layers in the paint kit quite confusing. Any ideas as to where I might be able to go to find out? Many Thanks!

TO be brutally honest you probably shouldnt start on a repaint. Or if you do be prepared for a LOT of frustration. I dont know how much experience you have with gimp but if you have just downloaded gimp and the paintkit after never using a layer based editor before then... time for some beginner tutorials for gimp. Also if you have got experience with photoshop there is a fork of gimp where they have made it as close to photoshop as it can be that might help with the ... I'll be politic here ... odd way that the coders have made gimp. Gimp in my mind was developed by coders with little to no feedback from designers and some things are just too weird. To the point that on my linux laptop I use krita which is far closer to a "normal" photoshop clone and has support for PSD. Plus it has just had some funding from epic ( unreal game engine ) so the thinking might be ... DDS support. Oh yes ! (krita is also available on windows )

But at the end of the day, makers of paintkits assume a modicum of pre-knowledge.

Ideas to find out : Ask one of the main repainters on here. There are a few that may have repainted ant's tiger moth and have some tips.

Or contact ant himself with a few questions. If you do the latter make sure you are very specific on the certain things that you are having trouble with eg. Layer34 seems to be doing nothing visually is that required by a different map ? Etc.

And last thing. If the paintkit has the metal map make sure to check out the channels. A developer has 2 ways of specifying the metalness work flow so if you're following something like a paintkit from AH that may be different to Ant's as he may have specified a different metalness workflow. We're lazy so we chose the simpler workflow but it has some drawbacks.